Our 2D game character grew 3% taller every time he walked

https://hey.paris/posts/leo-sprite-alignment/

by parisidau • 2 months ago

20 19 2 months ago

hey.paris

jay_kyburz• 2 months ago

This is not normal. Artists can and do work in a fixed size sprite sheet for so many reasons.

rf15• 2 months ago

Absolute trivial problem; I wonder why this needed a blog post. Maybe to advertise the development progress?

AnthonBerg• 2 months ago

M… maybe… because he transiently accumulated 3% greater zeroeth-derivative value every time he first-derivatived along an orthogonal axis.

kdheiwns2• 2 months ago

Yeah, this line from the article:

Artists work in whatever canvas size makes sense for the motion they’re drawing.

made me think "what?" Artists making concept art or drawing for fun, sure. Whatever resolution is comfortable is fine. But for animation or in-game art, a resolution is always defined. Even the most amateur artists learn about sprite sheets the first time they try 2D animation, and rule one of sprite sheets is using a uniform resolution for every frame.

Karliss• 2 months ago

The problem here wasn't that frames in single animation had different sizes, but separate animations. The example images are a bit misleading since they show only one frame from each animation.

Every animation tool will provide consistency across frames of single animation, but functionality for aligning and managing transitions between pairs of different animations is less common and more in the territory of game development tools instead of animation drawing.

That's still something the game programmer linking animations together should be familiar with. You could still have artist use single frame size for all animations, but that means having gigantic square many times the width/height of character since you can have some animations which are stretched horizontally and some which are very tall. And if your workflow doesn't include good sprite packing, such gigantic frames can easily become impractical in terms of texture size. Having the game programmer define single anchor point per animation (assuming aligned frames within each animation) doesn't take much time at all. You wouldn't want to realign individual frames within each animation (that's part of artistic intent and artist should do at least that much), but even that would take order of magnitude less time than the process of drawing those frames. There are still times the programmer might have to go through each frame defining anchor point/hitbox, when artist picked a wrong config during export producing packed sprite sheet and there is no time to reexport it, or when dealing with animations that mix animated and software driven movement like large jumps.

halflife2• 2 months ago

Don’t like to cast stones, but this feels like Claude trying whatever it can to make things work, without fixing the underlying process and problem.

“It looks like the user wants to run curl on windows machine, I need to bootstrap Linux under docker, and channel bash commands into shell inside docker, so the user would be able to run curl natively.”

pwdisswordfishq• 2 months ago

Disappointed that this is not about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8bQ2yxyotw

ddxv• 2 months ago

Agree, was hoping it was a game where the character grows as you move. Paris should turn that bug into a feature.

ofrzeta• 2 months ago

I thought about this story by Michael Ende "Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver" where's a character named 'Mr. Tur Tur, a "Scheinriese" ("apparent giant", as he appears smaller the closer he gets)' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Button_and_Luke_the_Engine...). This could be implemented in a game.

nnevatie• 2 months ago

Reads like something that came out of an LLM.

raincole• 2 months ago

I honestly don't get why someone would write a blog post for such a simple problem. It's fizzbuzz level. I thought the author might be an artist who knows very little about programming and is just learning, but according the about page they have PhD and has published 20 programming books...?

wingerlang• 2 months ago

It marketing by showing behind the scenes content.

toasty228• 2 months ago

SEO and/or terminal "I have to post everything online" syndrome

rbanffy• 2 months ago

Wouldn’t it make sense to calculate the character box when bundling the assets rather than at runtime?

LoganDark• 2 months ago

There's a lot of LLM fluff here, I'd love to see just the prompt

charcircuit• 2 months ago

The origin / root node should be authored as part of the asset. Just putting it in the center of a bounding box doesn't work well in every scenario.

halflife2• 2 months ago

Reading the blog I thought I was probably missing something. Reading the comments I learn that I missed nothing. Weird blog post.

PunchyHamster• 2 months ago

The whole thing should’ve been an email

"Hey, artist, could you add a layer with straight line in you file and fit animation so character actually walks on it?"

...but I imagine the artist was also AI here...

Our 2D game character grew 3% taller every time he walked

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